A Wicket Diary

I’m used to working on a Windows XP box, and one of the first things I do is either install the powertoys, and especially the Open Command prompt here plugin for the explorer. This plugin basically does the following.

It allows you to navigate to a folder using explorer, and when you click using the right button on the folder, you are given the possiblity to open a command prompt box (dos box) with the prompt waiting in that directory. This is quite a time saver since you don’t have to navigate yourself to that directory using those dreaded ‘cd’ commands.

This was one feature that I missed after I started using OSX on my power mac. But just a couple of minutes ago, I Googled for “osx finder terminal here” and got to an article that specifically targetted my problem.

And yes: it works great! No more ‘cd’ typing, just open terminal here.

I just posted my first JavaLobby article regarding Wicket. In this article I try to give you a heads up on markup inheritance.

It’s not a publish once effort: it will be integrated in our own website when our next release is up. That is the advantage when you write your own articles: you can publish it anywhere you want, any number of times.

On the documentation front we are making some progress, as we will be moving our website’s content into a real CMS. We have chosen drupal as it seems to be one of the best CMS’s out there, with great community and we have some knowledge about it as well. And it’s good enough for Spring, so it wouldn’t hurt us either.

I know that we should have implemented our own CMS using Wicket, but that is a lot of work, better spent at improving Wicket for you. And of course, one of our own community members is already working on it.

R.J. Lorimer of JavaLobby fame has written an article about Wicket’s nice URL support. So if you want to get sexy URL’s while using Wicket, you know now how to do it.

The Wicket project has released the third beta release of the 1.2 effort.

This is our third beta release of the Wicket 1.2 version. We expect this to be the final beta and start finalizing this version soon. Major features of Wicket 1.2 include:

• Native, cross-platform AJAX support: use AJAX without having to write a single line of JavaScript. Wicket’s AJAX cross-platform capabilities have been rated ‘A’
• Render multiple components in one AJAX call, where each component can occupy any part of the page
• Improved markup inheritance: panels, pages, header contributions
• Improved and simplified internationalization (i18n) support, using , better resource bundle lookup strategy
• Multiple form component validation, validate two or more fields that are related
• Improved form handling: clear form validation workflow that allows you to much easier defined required and type conversion attributes of a form component
• Nice URL support through URL mounting
• Markup fragments (inline panels)
• Improved performance by replacing OGNL with our own object graph language parser
• Response filter support, added ServerTime and ServerClientTime filters
• Reloading of resource bundles in development mode
• Improved unit test support for your Wicket components and pages through the WicketTester, create unittests that run outside the container.
• Out-of-the-box AJAX components: paging navigator, link with fallback, auto-updater, AJAX form, AJAX submit buttons, etc.
• Improved authorization and authentication support, giving you the power to specify authorization at the component level. An example project featuring a role based, annotation framework is now part of the standard distribution.
• Spring support for injecting your business logic into your web pages in a non-intrusive manner, while still being able to use the convenient Wicket idiom for creating pages (using the Java new operator).
• Improved settings system: settings are now partitioned into logical groupings to make them easier to find
• Numerous bug fixes and minor improvements

The upcoming final Wicket 1.2 release will be a major landmark in the history of Wicket and is highly anticipated.

We have tried to keep API changes to a minimum, but had to change and remove some methods and classes. Wicket 1.2 will not be a drop-in replacement, though most of your application’s pages and components should not be affected. There is a migration guide available on our wiki:

Migrating to Wicket 1.2

This is the third beta release, so not considered production ready. Please help us iron out the last bugs by downloading and testing this beta release.

View the Wicket T.V. commercial